I'm your host, Jester. I've been an EVE Online player for about six years. One of my four mains is Ripard Teg, pictured at left. Sadly, I've succumbed to "bittervet" disease, but I'm wandering the New Eden landscape (and from time to time, the MMO landscape) in search of a cure.You can follow along, if you want...

Saturday, May 31, 2014

May junk drawer

Welcome to the junk drawer, part of a series of monthly posts in which I dump all the stuff that I couldn't develop into full blog posts this past month. This month at mid-month I folded a lot of what was in the junk drawer up to that point into a "Distant voices" post so if you haven't read that post, you should definitely start there. The rest of what's in the junk drawer are longer bits, graphics, and things that didn't make it into that post, usually because they came up in the back half of the month.

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Let's start with a few more distant voices, since I'm already on the topic. If you've ever been happy to get the pre-release versions of the EFT data files, then you have EVE player Namamai to thank for that. He's one of the smartest EVE players I know... and now he's started a blog. You should definitely keep an eye on it!

I got a kick out of this post by Kirith Kodachidissecting the Prophecy trailer. He did miss a trick, though, by scoffing at the idea of EVE, DUST, and Valkyrie players eventually working on the same objective. That's more or less exactly what a lot of people said about the Fanfest 2012 trailer and EVE and DUST players working together.

This article about Steam trading is the best piece of gaming journalism I read this month.

This is kind of cool: blogger TurAmarth ElRandir wrote an Open Letter to CCP asking if CCP Seagull's space colonization vision was going to have a place for the small gang player. And rather surprisingly, Seagull responded!

This blog post about game design is ancient, and is about a game about as far-removed from EVE as you can get. And yet I can't help seeing applicability to EVE in every paragraph. Even the freakin' title is applicable.

My favorite posts at Crossing Zebras? The "CZ Minutes" posts where all of the writers get together and debate in text about something. It's kind of like a written pod-cast, except better because the positions are better thought-out. Go check them out!

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I love how the Mordu's Legion ships look, but I think they belong in another game. Aren't EVE ships supposed to be more... I dunno... more industrial than this? Grittier, perhaps?

If you ever intend to run for the CSM, bookmark this Fanfest retrospective. It's a pretty damn fine list of CCP developers and the topics that they feel strongly about. It's not exactly a one-for-one list of who works on what features, but in some cases it's damn close. CSM8 came up with the idea of building a big spreadsheet of every CCP dev we came into contact with: their name, team, job, Twitter accounts, e-mails, work location, even a place to take notes. But posts like this are where spreadsheets like that start.

I continue to be so impressed with the weekly updates that Xander Phoena, Sugar Kyle, and mynnna are doing! But I do kind of wish that they'd publish a joint post on what CCP did in the previous week so that they each can focus on what they individually think about what CCP did the previous week. That way, I wouldn't have to sift through the same list of stuff in all three places (or more often, two places with the third saying the other two already wrote the list, hee!).

That said, getting the three perspectives is really interesting! It's particularly interesting to see each of them talk about particularly contentious features.

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A couple of Kerbal Space Program junk drawer items! I got such a kick out of this survey taken of KSP players and how they feel about science and/or the space program after playing KSP. Even if you don't play KSP, go check it out!

Have I ever linked the kerbalmaps.com website and this rather extraordinary Mun map? I don't think I have. This thing was invaluable to me when I was plotting where to try my most recent attempts to make rovers viable.

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And that's all for the junk drawer this month. Even with a mid-month cleaning, there was still a lot of stuff in there!

12 comments:

"TurAmarth ElRandir wrote an Open Letter to CCP asking if CCP Seagull's space colonization vision was going to have a place for the small gang player. And rather surprisingly, Seagull responded!"

Yeah, unfortunately, there won't be any small gang or solo players left in the game by the time "space colonization" happens. The ongoing series of poorly designed changes they are insisting need to be made to get there are resulting in players either joining the null sec alliances or unsubbing from the game.

They said when they first introduced star gates that there is going to be solo/small gang content as part of star gate development. And they've started following through as well! Enjoy your ghost site equivalents as the power blocks get star gates...

Re: the Mordu's Legion aesthetic—both of the links you posted show out-of-date skins which have since been updated. They're more detailed now (and dare I say, grittier?). Their dev blog introduction has some nice shots of the new art.

"I got a kick out of this post by Kirith Kodachi dissecting the Prophecy trailer. He did miss a trick, though, by scoffing at the idea of EVE, DUST, and Valkyrie players eventually working on the same objective. That's more or less exactly what a lot of people said about the Fanfest 2012 trailer and EVE and DUST players working together."

On the other hand, it's a struggle to label the way that EVE and DUST players currently work together as deep or meaningful, so perhaps he's not so far off the mark after all.

One hopes Project Legion will add more interaction. Looking just at explosions, it has been fairly one way: EVE players providing orbital strikes. To complete that circle, DUST players on the opposing team need to be able to knock out the ship setting up for orbital strike.

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